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Big Data is Really about Architecture

Lori MacVittie of ZDnet opines, " What's missing from all the conversations about big data is a focus on the infrastructure necessary to support it — and in particular its use in real time. For many companies, big data means opening up access to the data warehouses they have always maintained. Data warehousing has been and continues to be a critical component of enterprise-class organisations. Such systems provide the aggregation of data from across the organisation and enable it to be sliced and diced into consumable chunks allowing business analysts to provide insights into business conditions."

She goes on, "It is this form of the data — parsed and processed into actionable information — that will be integrated back into the datacentre, into applications and infrastructure, to serve as input to the myriad systems and processes making near real-time decisions. But data warehouses were not designed for the volume of integration and access required by such models — nor are the various business-intelligence systems that assist in processing the data. The sheer volume of incoming data can be at times enough to overwhelm the supporting systems. Add to those volumes the number of systems trying to access the refined data and it is unlikely such applications will withstand the onslaught."